Pittsburgh airport to host fracking sites starting this month

The floundering Pittsburgh International Airport is expected to soon begin earning nearly a quarter of its annual operating budget by letting a local energy company conduct fracking operations deep under the once booming air traffic hub.

On Monday, the New York Times reported first that the
airport in southwestern Pennsylvania — the second busiest in the
Keystone State — cut a deal with Consol Energy that will let the
oil and gas company begin drilling next month to extract
resources from beneath PIT by way of fracking, or hydraulic
fracturing.

Earlier this year in March, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Alleghany County,
PA is expected to gain upwards of $500 million during the next
two decades by letting Consol drill as many as 60 wells on 8,800
acres of airport property, the likes of which would yield an
estimated 280 billion cubic feet to 800 billion cubic feet of
natural gas, according to the paper.

Consol will now drill its first well there later this month, the
Times reported this week, which will be dug outside of the
airport’s fence but will nevertheless aim to extract resources
buried underneath the facility’s terminals and runways by pumping
liquid around 6,000 feet below the earth.

Indeed, PIT is expected to pull in $20 million annually as part
of the operation — a substantial chunk of the less than $91
million it currently costs to operate the 75-gate facility;
according to the Times’ Matthew L. Wald, the airport today only
handles about half of the flights it did a decade ago, and around
42 percent of its annual budget is being used currently to handle
debts.

Profits aside, however, fracking plans are expected to continue
attracting criticism from opponents who argue that the potential
safety risks of those drilling operations aren’t fully understood
yet: earlier this year the New York Court of Appeals ruled that
municipalities within the Empire State can elect on their own to
ban fracking operations within their own locales, and the city of
Los Angeles, California has outright banned the drilling process
altogether.

“It uses excessive amounts of water in a drought, and most
significantly for me is the incredible risk of devastating
earthquakes,” Councilmember Mike Bonin, a co-sponsor of the
proposal that banned fracking in LA, told KNX 1070 Newsradio
earlier this year with regards to why he wanted to keep drilling
out of the area.

Some studies have concluded previously that fracking may in fact
a role play a role in causing an increase in seismic activity,
and one Texas airport that hosted drilling wells on its premises
actually saw a decrease in earthquakes when they stopped energy
companies from blasting chemicals below the earth a few years
earlier.

"When the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport needed to stop its
earthquake spike a few years ago," MSNBC host Rachel Maddow
said during a broadcast in February, "they temporarily
shut down the wells that were injecting fracking fluid into the
ground at high pressure on the airport property, and lo and
behold, those earthquakes stopped."

As RT reported previously, regulators from the states of Ohio,
Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas met for the first time in March to
discuss limiting the risks posed by the controversial practice,
citing specifically reports of increased earthquakes near
fracking cites.